Lesson 13: More group work

As you saw in the previous lessons, all the quantifiers including the star *, plus +, repetition {m,n} and the question mark ? can all be used within the capture group patterns. This is the only way to apply quantifiers on sequences of characters instead of the individual characters themselves.

For example, if I knew that a phone number may or may not contain an area code, the right pattern would test for the existence of the whole group of digits (\d{3})? and not the individual characters themselves (which would be wrong).

Depending on the regular expression engine you are using, you can also use non-capturing groups which will allow you to match the group but not have it show up in the results.

Below are a couple different common display resolutions, try to capture the width and height of each display.

Exercise 13: Matching nested groups
Task Text Capture Groups  
capture 1280x720 1280 720 To be completed
capture 1920x1600 1920 1600 To be completed
capture 1024x768 1024 768 To be completed
Solution

This one is pretty clean, we just need to capture the two groups of digits as such (\d+)x(\d+).

Solve the above task to continue on to the next problem, or read the Solution.